It often happens that songs people believe to be traditional folk songs were actually created by known authors and composers. In Britain, for example, The Skye Boat Song is often thought of as an old Scottish ballad about the Jacobite rebellion, yet it was composed in the late 19^th century by Sir Harold Boulton. Similarly, the Scottish poet Robert Burns collected and adapted traditional songs in the late 18^th century but also wrote new verses that entered oral tradition, such as Auld Lang Syne. In Germany, Romantic songs called Lieder were written by composers like Franz Schubert or Johannes Brahms, yet many of them sound like folk music because of their simple style and themes. In Russia, many songs from early Soviet films about collective farms later came to be treated like folk songs because they were widely sung and memorized.

One of the best-known examples of a poem that travelled across languages and cultures is Those Evening Bells by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779−1852). Moore was a very popular poet whose verse was often written to be set to music. Those Evening Bells first appeared in 1818 in English in his collection Popular National Airs, with musical arrangements by Sir John Stevenson. The tune of the song was referred to as The Bells of St. Petersburg. The poem evokes the slow tolling of bells at dusk and uses simple language and emotional imagery that easily give it the character of an old folk text. However, scholars who tried to find the Russian original of the tune The Bells of St. Petersburg were unsuccessful.

Soon after its publication, Those Evening Bells became known in Russia. In 1828 the Russian poet Ivan Kozlov (1779−1840), famous for translating Lord Byron into Russian and Alexander Pushkin into English, created a Russian version titled Ве­чер­ний звон (Evening Bells). Kozlov’s text is not a literal translation but very close in spirit to the original. At some point, there were even doubts about which poem had come first: the one by Thomas Moore or Kozlov's Russian version.

A year later, in 1829, Alexander Turgenev (a distant cousin of the future novelist Ivan Turgenev) was travelling in Britain and met Thomas Moore several times. It is possible that he showed Moore the Russian translation of the poem. In his journal he noted: “January 7, Wednesday. Moore wrote his poem "Those Evening Bells" for me as a keepsake, and I said goodbye to him until London, in May.”

The celebrated Russian composer Alexander Alyabiev (1785−1851), best known for his romance The Nightingale (Со­ло­вей), later set Kozlov’s words to music. His setting became popular in Russian salons and concert halls. However, if you ask any Russian today to sing Ве­чер­ний звон, you will hear a completely different melody.

After Alyabiev, several other composers  — including Arkady Rachmaninov, the grandfather of Sergey Rachmaninov, and Alexander Grechaninov  — set Kozlov’s text to music. And yet, the melody known today was written by none of them. For a long time it was considered a folk tune. Only in the early 2000s did researcher Ludmila Zummer identify the true author: Vasily Zinoviev (1874−1925).

Zinoviev is better known for his church music. His chant God Is With Us is sung during Christmas services in many Orthodox churches. He conducted the 100-voice choir of the Theological Seminary in Yaroslavl and also led the choir of an orphanage where he served as a priest for thirty years. In 1907 he wrote Ве­чер­ний звон for a children’s choir, later adapting it for a mixed choir as its popularity grew. After the 1917 Revolution, when persecutions of religion began, his name gradually disappeared from concert programmes, and later arrangements described the melody simply as “folk”.